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It was a quiet night in Bludhaven. Quiet by Gotham standards, anyway. Compared to Arkham breakouts, the occasional gang war was nothing.
Dick finished tying up the last few unconscious combatants and straightened, wincing at the bruises he could already feel forming all over. Well, almost nothing. He was going to be sore tomorrow.
Pulling out his grapple, he looked up to make sure he had a clear shot.
And stopped as he saw a figure in familiar black and orange staring down at him from the nearest roof.
Wonderful.
Dick sighed and fired his grapple anyway. Might as well get it over with.
"About time," was the first thing Slade said as soon as Dick landed next to him.
"I was a little busy," said Dick. "Have you been up there this whole time? Nice of you to help me out."
Slade shrugged. "You had it handled."
"Uh huh. You here to try to kill me again or what?"
Slade scoffed. "If I was, you'd already be dead."
Before Dick could dispute that, Slade continued in an apparent non sequitur. "I've just returned from a contract in Nanda Parbat."
"Okay," Dick said slowly. Had Ra's hired Slade to kill someone he couldn't get at himself? Slade had just said he wasn't here to kill Dick, but he probably wasn't above using Dick as bait for Bruce.
"Not to kill anyone," Slade went on, no doubt aware of what Dick was thinking. "They know my skills, my talent, and they wanted me to use my expertise-"
Dick rolled his eyes. "World's deadliest mercenary, I know, get to the point."
"-to help train someone," Slade finished, glaring. "I was there for three months."
Dick resisted the urge to tell Slade to get to the point again.
"Figured they had a really promising student they wanted to teach as much as possible to," Slade said. "And, well, they did. Only it was a kid."
Dick blinked. "A kid?" Whatever he was expecting Slade to say, it wasn't this.
"A kid," Slade repeated. "I was there to perfect his fighting skills, to train him with swords and guns and staffs and knives and bows, only he already knew all of that, probably nearly as well as you do. Nine years old, this boy."
"Nine," Dick repeated. He'd been nine, when his parents had died. It wasn't a year he liked to remember.
"So," Slade said, "there I was training a nine-year-old in the use of extensive weaponry, and hand-to-hand combat, and he already knew most of it, and picked up what he didn't like he'd been born to it. Well, he was, I suppose. He told me he'd been taught to use a sword since he could walk. He was proud of it."
"Wouldn't a sword be...kind of heavy for a toddler?" was all Dick could think to say. "Aren't most swords taller than your average toddler?"
Slade shrugged. "None of the weapons looked modified to me."
Dick had been nine when Bruce had started training him. Started, not culminated or tried to perfect, because Dick needed some way to vent his grief and anger, and aside from Zucco's takedown, which Bruce had said he should be there for to get some closure, Dick hadn't been allowed out onto the streets properly until he was nearly eleven.
"So the League has been training a little kid to become an assassin," Dick summed up. "And has been doing this for the kid's whole life, apparently."
Slade nodded jerkily. "I'd already accepted the contract. I couldn't refuse to train him. I watched him training with some other teachers, too, and you know what training is like. You've heard what League training is like. To put a child through that since the time he could walk..."
"You want to help him," Dick murmured.
Slade stared at him, jaw set. "I kill people for a living. I like the work I do. I know what you sanctimonious heroes think of me. But this is a child. I didn't become a soldier until I was nearly twice his age, and I made my own choice. He doesn't have any choice, never had one in his life. He's the same age as my Joey when-" He cut himself off, speaking with gritted teeth. "I have standards."
Dick knew that Deathstroke, though he would never admit it, harbored a soft spot for boys who reminded him of his sons; it was probably the main reason Dick was still breathing. But that couldn't be all of it. Why had he come all the way here to tell Dick about this? There had to be information he was missing.
"Why are you telling me this?" Dick asked. "Why didn't you just take him with you when you left?"
Slade shrugged. "Well, telling the Bat the news probably wouldn't end well for me," he said. "And Ra's al Ghul would find ever so creative ways to have my head if I kidnapped the Heir to the Demon's Head out from under his nose."
Wait.
"His heir?" Dick couldn't keep the note of shock out of his voice. They'd been tangling with the League on and off for over a decade; how had they never had word of this?
"What other child would Ra's al Ghul care enough about to go to the expense of hiring me?" Slade asked sardonically. "Of course, 'care' isn't the word I would use, and I say this as someone whose son died following his path and had the other one mutilated on his account."
Dick winced. When Slade started talking about his sons, there was reason to be wary. When Slade started blaming himself for what had happened to his sons, it meant he was really not in a good mood.
Still, he was here, and he was talking, and he hadn't tried to kill anybody yet, which meant that hopefully he hadn't segued to blaming Dick again.
"And why did you specifically want to tell me or Batman?" he asked, hoping to divert Slade's train of thought.
He tsked, and Dick scowled. "Any one of you Bats would have worked. Really, I would have thought that someone who worked so long with the world's greatest detective-" He somehow managed to make the title sound mocking, even though he spoke the words in exactly the same inflection as the rest of his sentence, "-would have started to piece it together by now. There aren't many kids in the League, you know."
And thank everything holy for that. Most of the League's members were those who were searching for something, whether it was truth or piece or advanced martial arts and the opportunity to use them or weapons skills or the chance to kill an enemy, and had found what they wanted at the feet of Ra's al Ghul, earning their undying devotion. Bruce had been one of those, once, but Bruce had been one of the only people who had left. Dick supposed some children could have been brought along by their parents, growing up to be just as well-trained and deadly and devoted as the rest of them, but he didn't think there were too many who were actually born there. While there were probably some, Dick got the feeling that romantic relationships were discouraged in the League, what with the whole "don't get too close to anyone you might be ordered to kill one day" thing.
Did Bruce even know that Ra's apparently had an heir? The closest thing the immortal assassin had had to an heir up until now had been -
The pieces all slotted together at once.
Slade specifically wanting to tell someone connected to Batman. Heir to the Demon's Head, which meant the boy was a direct relative of Ra's al Ghul, and there weren't many of those. All the effort that must have gone in to teaching such a young child how to fight as well as any other assassin. Dick tried to remember nine years ago, no, ten-
"Talia," he said. "Bruce."
"He looks like him," Slade said. "Has his mother's eyes and coloring, but the rest is all the Bat. That scowl is definitely his." He seemed to find this amusing. Of course he did.
"Why wouldn't Talia tell him," Dick hissed, because no matter how much Bruce did not want to hear Dick's opinions on his and Talia's....situationship was the least offensive word Dick could think of, the woman called him Beloved, and the al Ghuls did not bestow titles lightly.
"She and her father had her own plans for him," Slade said drily. "None of which involve her spending much time with him. She comes by to 'assess his progress' and 'test his skills' once a month, and the kid looks at her like she hung the moon. I'll say this for my parents, they never tried stabbing me and then lectured me on all the ways I maneuvered wrong if they didn't miss."
Dick was going to strangle someone. Preferable various al Ghuls.
"I need to tell B," Dick said. He could make it to Gotham in just over half an hour if he completely ignored all speed limits. They needed to start planning now. He had a little brother to rescue. "I - thank you, Slade. You didn't have to-" There had been no gain in this for the mercenary, no payment for information they would never have known. Slade would probably actually lose potential contracts in the future, if Ra's ever traced how Batman had come to know of his son to its source.
"I told you, kid. I have standards. Letting a kid grow up in the League is way below them." Slade shrugged elaborately. "Which brings me to the rest of the news I'm bringing."
"There's more?" Dick asked. "Don't tell me Talia had twins or something."
Slade smirked. "Nah. About a week before I left, the kid got a bodyguard. Someone to follow him around and stop any of the assassination attempts that get too close to succeeding and taste his food in case someone who isn't his grandfather poisoned it. He's also a kid, maybe fifteen or sixteen. He was important enough to Talia that she had him thrown in the Lazarus Pit and decided to train him herself." Slade's smirk grew wider. "He looked rather familiar."